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Now Onstage in Spain: Austerity

Among the struggling cultural institutions in Spain are the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia.Credit
Monica Gumm

BARCELONA, Spain — There is no sign marking the door to La Poderosa, a dance and performance space on a scruffy street in the Raval neighborhood here. The door itself is low and set a few inches off the ground; to get inside, visitors have to climb up and duck down.

Up a flight of dusty stairs is an airy yet cozy loft with a slightly raised platform for performances at one end, a bar at the other and some hand-me-down tables and chairs. One afternoon recently, as the sun streamed through a wall of windows, Javier Vaquero Ollero sipped a beer and talked about the future.

“We really live day by day,” said Mr. Vaquero Ollero, 28, a dancer and choreographer and a member of the collective that runs the space. “You cannot project about the future. You cannot have an idea of a project or design a certain kind of artistic project from one year’s distance, because you actually don’t know if you can pay the rent next month.”

The rent on La Poderosa’s loft isn’t much: about $1,100 a month. But it’s hard to pay even that when just a trickle is coming in. Like most arts organization in Spain the space used to draw the better part of its income from public subsidies. At the high point, a few years ago, La Poderosa was receiving about $90,000 a year from various governmental sources. It used that for rent, hosting performers and technical costs, and to give three members of the collective small salaries as employees.

The housing bubble that began with the introduction of the euro and burst in Spain in 2008 was not unlike the one that helped cause a recession in the United States. But the rigid austerity-focused response to Spain’s crisis and the strictures of the nation’s membership in the euro zone have prevented any similar recovery from taking hold.

The country’s recession continues to deepen; unemployment continues to rise. The jobless rate reached 22.8 percent at the end of last year, more than double the European average, and is much higher for young people.

Two successive governments have desperately cut spending to meet targets for aid from the European Union. If anything, the budget decisions have failed to stem the crisis and have been devastating for culture. A far greater proportion of arts budgets in Europe — often upward of 50 percent — comes from government subsidies than in the United States.

Private donations in Europe are generally not tax deductible, so when subsidies are cut, it is hard to generate new income to compensate. In Spain ticket sales, the largest remaining source of revenue, have been affected by a large hike in the value-added tax on tickets, to 21 percent from 8 percent. (Using the tax’s Spanish acronym, the newspaper El País coined a bitter rhyme, calling it an “IVA-guillotina.”)

A calmly devastating report produced for the Culture Ministry and updated at the end of 2012 found that since 2009 the average cultural organization had reduced its budget or volume of activity by 49.8 percent.

All in all the situation for the arts in Spain is dire, affecting both the underground, experimental world epitomized by La Poderosa and much more famous, mainstream institutions and personalities.

The Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, one of the country’s two leading opera houses, has laid off about 100 employees since the crisis began. When asked in an interview in his office overlooking the bustling Ramblas Avenue what had changed at the Liceu since the crisis, Joan Francesc Marco, the theater’s general director, simply burst out laughing at the enormity of the answer.

“Everything,” he said.

The tenor Plácido Domingo, sitting in the serene lobby of the seaside Arenas Hotel in Valencia recently, said, “The hope for everybody is that we go back to the level of quantity and quality we had before the crisis.”

But quantity is a daunting problem at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, where Mr. Domingo was singing in the Verdi rarity “I Due Foscari.” The house’s budget and performance schedule have both been cut in half, and its soaring, retro-futurist Santiago Calatrava building, which opened in 2005, therefore sits dormant most of the year.

“What has been spent here was at a moment when Spain had all the money,” the Palau’s director, Helga Schmidt, said of the building, part of the sprawling, expensive Calatrava-designed City of Arts and Sciences complex. “I think it is a great project and will stay here forever. But in the future politicians and those who have to pay will have to be very careful.”

Even in boom times arts management is about surmounting an inexorable series of obstacles. But Ms. Schmidt’s job has become purely a labyrinth of cuts and compromises. She sought to rent the Metropolitan Opera’s starkly stylized recent production of Verdi’s “Ballo in Maschera” but could not afford it. Instead, for the same amount she cobbled together four loans of simple, traditional productions of standards like Verdi’s “Rigoletto” (from Warsaw) and Puccini’s “Bohème” (from Philadelphia).

Attendance was spotty two weeks ago for a powerful program of Montsalvatge, Beethoven and Sibelius from the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana, led by the rising conductor Pablo Heras-Casado. Unable to fill her seats with locals consistently, Ms. Schmidt now faces the sudden need to increase marketing, hoping to sell Valencian culture to American and Japanese tourists.

Photo

American counterparts like the Met, where Jonas Kaufmann and René Pape are starring in “Parsifal,” are doing relatively well.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Neither the biggest cities nor the most important institutions have been spared. Cuts forced the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid to cancel a planned Lucian Freud retrospective. The Teatro Real, in the same city, has faced cuts of a third of its budget, forcing, among other adjustments, the cancellation of a much-anticipated three-year series of opera productions in collaboration with the Berlin Philharmonic.

While major institutions have been cut badly, smaller ones have been decimated. The Orquestra de Girona, a chamber orchestra in a university town about 60 miles north of Barcelona, has been guaranteed less than 30 percent of the support it had just a few years ago. Founded in 1996, the orchestra has fostered up-and-coming Spanish artists. For several years it engaged Mr. Heras-Casado, then an unknown young conductor from Granada who is now, at 35, embarked on a major international career.

After years of relatively robust programming, the orchestra could afford only a single concert this year. Irene Llongarriu, the ensemble’s secretary and manager, brought a manifesto she had written about the crisis to a meeting with a reporter at a cafe in Girona’s Plaça Independencia.

“It is a truly asphyxiating situation at times,” it read in part, “and at great personal risk we want to continue performing music. Yet despite everything we continue, even if just to offer a testimonial. We do not want to quit.”

Midsize organizations like these — large enough to have real expenses but small enough to have seen their relatively minor subsidies mostly vanish — may end up the lasting victims of a financial crisis that will eventually polarize the cultural scene, leaving just the biggest institutions, the Prados and Teatro Reals, and the smallest. But for the major institutions, with millions of dollars of fixed costs and hundreds of employees, the worst part may be the perpetual uncertainty.

“What I have asked for is that the government gives me an insurance for at least three seasons the amount of money they will give me without further cuts,” Ms. Schmidt, of Valencia, said. “Because so far I have always had last-minute cuts, and that is damaging. You have to change things at the last minute. You have to undo very carefully put-together projects. Give me three seasons, and I can make plans.”

Gerard Mortier, the Teatro Real’s artistic director, has incorporated into his contract a clause that nullifies it if his performance budget is reduced any further. But he has led the theater through the crisis to present seasons far more exciting than companies like the Paris Opera, whose budgets have remained relatively stable. At the Teatro Real world premieres and recent works abound. Mr. Mortier has eagerly taken up operas that pose timely questions of capitalism and consumerism, from Weill and Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” to Messiaen’s “St. François d’Assise.”

He has also curbed (a bit) the notorious extravagance of his experimentations, channeling his interest in innovation into a searching series of operas in concert, like a revelatory period-instrument version of Wagner’s “Parsifal” conducted by Thomas Hengelbrock a few weeks ago. All performances offer a rush program in which unsold tickets can be bought for 10 percent of face value.

Photo

The Teatro Real in Madrid, where “The Perfect American” is being staged is one of the institutions in Spain that is struggling.Credit
Javier Del Real / Teatro Real / Ho/European Pressphoto Agency

Barcelona’s Liceu, under Mr. Marco and its adventurous artistic director, Joan Matabosch, continues to push its audiences forward in both repertory (Weill’s “Street Scene” opens on March 1) and productions (Stefan Herheim’s dazzling version of Dvorak’s “Rusalka” last December).

In the coming years arts institutions in Spain and throughout Europe will have to turn, for better and worse, toward an arts financing system more like America’s privatized model. The Liceu’s marketing chief, Martí Torres Mata, joined the company two years ago after a career in retail, and a newly announced initiative project based in New York seeks support for the theater among American donors.

Mr. Vaquero Ollero, of La Poderosa, is part of a group of young artists called Ocho Octubre, named after the date last fall when it met for the first time in response to a wave of subsidy cuts. With a mailing list of more than 100, the organization has met every two weeks and aims to lobby the government, to train artists in self-sustainability strategies and to connect the arts with other areas experiencing drastic cuts, from health to education.

A few years ago an abandoned brothel in Madrid opened as a kind of microtheater, offering short plays before an audience of only a dozen or so. Such intimate performance experiences have expanded into something of a movement. Mr. Vaquero Ollero has twice danced in performances that took place in people’s homes, and he attends more and more of the same. There is less work being done, he said, but with no need to answer to anyone for financing, what remains is more raw and experimental.

“When you know you don’t have a theater, it provokes something very different,” he said. “It affects the work. The conditions are changing, but that doesn’t mean the work is going to be worse.”

For many smaller institutions, going off the subsidy grid brings an unexpectedly welcome freedom from forms and bureaucracy. “We don’t spend so much time organizing anymore, because you don’t have to organize anything,” Mr. Vaquero Ollero added. “We have more time to rehearse and research.”

Curbed under decades of dictatorship, the cultural scene in Spain is effectively just three decades old, still young and fragile.

“The future has a lot of uncertainty in store for us,” Alfonso Aijón, the country’s most prominent classical music promoter, wrote in an e-mail. “But we have to trust that necessity is the mother of invention and that it will wake us from the somnolence resulting from the easy, irresponsible life we’ve had in recent years, which has led us to the regrettable situation we are going through today.”

As dancing gigs in Barcelona have dried up, Mr. Vaquero Ollero spends more of his time working abroad. He has considered moving back in with his parents, as many young people he knows have, or leaving for Mexico City or Brazil.

“I’m not here to suffer,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on February 17, 2013, on page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Now Onstage in Spain: Austerity. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe